General sound map

Recordings of background atmospheres and incidental noises from all over London. Some form part of a sound grid series recorded at evenly-spaced points across the city, each marking the centre of a square on the map below.

Benson Avenue E6 June 2:00

Grid square: Forest Gate, West Ham

Recording date: 5 June 2015

Time of day: 3.15pm

Location: Benson Avenue near junction with Wilson Road, east London.

Description: Voices and footsteps of passersby, constant traffic in distance, a child runs along the pavement, a car passes, a car door slams and the motor starts, intermittent birdsong, airplane drone.

Additional notes: Find out more about Dave Pape's activities at Museum of Techno.

Queens Market 6:05

Grid square: Forest Gate, West Ham

Recording date: 16 June 2007

Time of day: Not known

Location: Queens Market, West Ham.

Description: Ambience at Queens Market in West Ham, a covered market of stalls selling food and cheap non-perishables. Voices of traders, customers and children, stall shutters are pulled down, and some kind of electronic toy plays the tune to 'Old Macdonald' on a loop.

Additional notes: Find out more about Dave Pape's activities at Museum of Techno.

West Ham fox cubs 1:12

Grid square: Forest Gate, West Ham

Recording date: 2/3/2009

Time of day: Not known

Location: West Ham cemetery, east London.

Description: "Two young foxes in a play fight in West Ham cemetery. I sneaked up behind a wall and recorded them for a while. I peered over the wall to discover they were only about four metres away [. . .] they were locked with paws on each other's shoulders screaming at each other." – Genghis Attenborough

Technical guff: High pass filter used to eliminate wind noise on recording.

About general sound map recordings

The majority of recordings on the general sound map are simply of curious or distinctive sounds heard around London. Some also appear elsewhere as part of the 12 Tones of London statistical recording project, and here are subsumed into their appropriate grid squares.

These kinds of recordings always have descriptive file names which don't require any further explanation. But just over a hundred others have ones consisting only of the letters 'TQ' followed by eight digits. These are the Ordnance Survey co-ordinates marking the exact centre of each of the sound map's 112 grid squares, and so these file names tell you with some precision where the recordings were made. Reaching each point was done with the help of a GPS receiver and a willingness to scramble over fences and run onto golf courses. The contents of those recordings are summarised in the graphic below:

The key on the left-hand side shows the most common sound categories encountered. The louder a particular sound type encountered at the centre of a grid square, the darker its icon. More than one icon of the same kind means that sound takes up more of the recording's length. Despite the wide spacing of the recording points and the brief duration of the sound files, they seem to do a reasonable job of plotting in outline the common or persistent sound types heard around London during the daytime.